Advertising and marketing represents a significant ongoing expense for most sellers and/or providers of consumer goods and services. Consequently, both sellers and providers of marketing and advertising tools are constantly looking for new ways to provide advertising to potential customers.
Typically, the sellers are willing to incur the expense of advertising in order to meet specific seller goals, including, but not limited to: to help build up a customer base; to get consumers into a store; to retain customers who find a lower price for an item from a competitor; to lure customers away from a competitor; and/or to help clear excess inventory and/or to boost sales of a given product.
Traditionally, advertising has been done through printed media, visual media, television, radio, etc. However, with the advent of the Internet and electronic commerce, several new avenues for advertising have also been opened, including general and content-based advertising, typically on websites, computing system applications, and Internet search engines. Currently, some providers of computing system implemented applications, search engines, and/or websites offer sellers of consumer goods and services the opportunity to place advertisements at strategic locations within the applications and/or websites. In some cases, these advertisements appear based on content and/or other criteria. In addition, in some instances, sellers of consumer goods and services are charged based on the number of potential customers that view the sellers advertise and/or link or “click” to the sellers website.
In order to most efficiently use their marketing and/or advertising resources, sellers would prefer to access consumers who have specific attributes that are particularly desirable to the seller. For instance, a seller may be particularly interested in targeting consumers who have a proven and/or historical spending record that indicates the consumer will be a particularly good find. As a specific example, a seller may be interested in targeting select consumers who shop with a competitor, or spend a threshold amount of money each month on products and/or services the seller offers. A seller may also be particularly interested in targeting select consumers of specific economic demographics, or who shop in a specific geographic location. In other instances, a seller may be particularly interested in targeting select consumers who meet any other criteria of interest.
Likewise, providers of marketing and advertising tools would like to be able to charge a premium to their clients, i.e., the sellers, for access to customers have proven spending histories, or who eventually turn out to be loyal and/or profitable customers of the seller.
In addition, most consumers would prefer to receive advertising that is relevant to the consumer, i.e., that is of use to the consumer and/or is directed to products and/or services the consumer uses.
Despite the desire of sellers, providers of marketing and advertising tools, as well as consumers, to create a better system for reaching desirable consumers, there currently is often no information, or limited information, available to the sellers and/or providers of marketing and advertising tools about a given consumer to enable the sellers and/or providers of marketing and advertising tools to accurately identify the consumer as a desirable, and/or probable, customer. In addition, even in the few cases where the limited information about a given consumer is available, the information is typically obtained from a single source, such as transactional data associated with a single credit card account, and is therefore incomplete, and the information is typically only available to larger retailers, advertisers and other sellers, such as the retailer offering the credit card account, that is the single source of information.
As a result of the situation discussed above, sellers are denied the ability to identify and target particularly desirable consumers, providers of marketing and advertising tools are denied the opportunity to profit by providing the sellers access to particularly desirable consumers, and consumers are also denied savings and efficiency that might otherwise be available to them. Consequently, the current situation represents a disservice to sellers, providers of marketing and advertising tools, as well as consumers.